A sample entry from the
Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature
(London & New York: Continuum, 2005)
Edited by
Bron Taylor
© 2005
All Rights Reserved
Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
primarily because human life may become untenable if
such anti-ecological lifeways continue, nor because a
creator deity requires an account of how humans have
executed their stewardship of the planet. Animist ecoPagans are primarily on the front lines confronting road
building, quarrying, clear-cutting and other exploitative
actions, because the community of life is threatened. It is
not that only humans can protest or act – although the
sight of a human lying in the mud in front of a bulldozer
may be a more powerful preventive of destruction than
that of a mere animal or plant. In the understanding of
many such activists, protest venues might be a location in
which humanity confronts itself with conflicting assessments of its place in the scheme of things. Over against the
notion that everything is a resource for humanity’s benefit
(provided either by God or nature) is the understanding
that humans are only one species among those whose lives
and cultures require sustenance and support. Animists
may be inspired by experiences of the participation of
elusive otherworld beings, but their primary motive is the
celebration of seemingly more mundane relationships.
Tylor’s theory of animism has been rejected by most.
But contemporary animists do not offer assertions about
the origins, development and true nature of all religion,
but a focused discussion about particular ways of being
related to the world. Like the earlier theory it is entangled
with notions of materiality, but now this arises from a
challenge to discourses that divide spirit and flesh, soul
and body, subject and object, life and matter, supernatural
and natural, culture and nature, people and environment,
community and resources, and so on. In dialogue with
particular indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and
cosmovisions, the new animism contests modernist preconceptions and invites the widening of relational
engagements generated and enhanced by gift exchanges
and other forms of mutuality. In both indigenous and
Western forms, animism encourages humans to see the
world as a diverse community of living persons worthy of
particular kinds of respect.
Animism is, however, more than the recognition of life
in those otherwise considered inanimate. This would
continue to prioritize what is exceptional to the West and
ignore what is self-evident to those who might appropriately be named “animists.” In the end, the recognition
of life is far too simple to be generative. What is important
is the mutual recognition of the ability to reciprocate,
relate and engage. Animists are people who encounter
other persons, only some of whom are human, as cultural
beings. Their various engagements with what might
otherwise be considered the environment or nature constitutes a complex of cultural relationships with a large
and diverse community. Such worldviews and lifeways
proffer exciting possibilities for underpinning relationships with the other-than-human world that contrast
dramatically with what is now normal or natural in
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modernity. Animism promises the enrichment of human
cultures by fuller engagement with what is too often taken
as background or resource-available to the construction
of culture. Instead, animists are those who seek cultures
of relationship rooted and expressed in respectful
relationships.
Graham Harvey
Further Reading
Bird-David, Nurit. “ ‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood,
Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current
Anthropology 40, Supplement (1999), 67–92.
Guthrie, Stewart Elliot. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory
of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press,
1993.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior
and Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In
S. Diamond, ed. Culture in History. Columbia:
Columbia University Press, 1952.
Morrison, Kenneth M. “Beyond the Supernatural.”
Religion 22 (1999), 201–5.
Piaget, Jean. “Children’s Philosophies.” In C. Murchison,
ed. A Handbook of Child Psychology. Worcester: Clark
University, 1933, 534–47.
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. New York: Bantam, 1995.
Tylor, E.B. Primitive Culture, 2 vols. London: John Murray,
1871.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1982.
See also: Animism; Animism: Humanity’s Original
Religious Worldview; Bioregionalism and the North
American Bioregional Congress; Hunting Spirituality and
Animism; Magic; Magic, Animism, and the Shaman’s
Craft; Radical Environmentalism; Snyder, Gary; Radical
Environmentalism; Walker, Alice; Zulu (amaZulu)
Ancestors and Ritual Exchange;
P
Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious
Worldview
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mere fact of
evolution had been around for a good long while. Fossil
evidence made it clear that species had undergone evolutionary change from ancient times to the present, and
most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it
at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary
change was not felt by them, not experienced as a
pressure, as it was by Charles Darwin. The fact alone
wasn’t sufficient for him. He wanted to know why species
had evolved over time. He knew there had to be some
intelligible mechanism or dynamic that would account for
it, and this is what he went looking for – with well known
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Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
results. In his Origin of Species, he wasn’t announcing the
fact of evolution, he was trying to make sense of the fact.
In my mid-twenties I began to feel a similar sort of
pressure, but it was a vague and undirected one. The
modern Age of Anxiety – the anxiety we’re all quite used
to living with today – was just being born. In her book
Silent Spring (1962) Rachel Carson enunciated a startlingly new idea: the pollutants we were so prodigiously
pouring into the world didn’t just obligingly vanish, they
produced changes, and these changes had consequences –
very possibly catastrophic ones. Of course everyone takes
this for granted now, but at the time this was devastating
news. In his book The Population Bomb (1968) Paul Ehrlich
pointed out that at our present rate of growth, we were
going to make the Earth uninhabitable to our own species
within a century. Again, a commonplace idea today, but
not so then. Overshadowing these things was the fact that
we all lived from day to day with the knowledge that at
any moment nuclear devastation could rain down on
American cities, to be answered by a rain of nuclear devastation on Soviet cities. The end of civilization – perhaps
even of human life itself – was a button-push away.
I wasn’t satisfied with the conventional explanation of
all this, which is that we’ve ended up badly because of the
Industrial Revolution. To my mind, this is like saying that
Hamlet ended up badly because he took on Laertes in a
fencing match. To understand why Hamlet ended up badly,
you can’t just look at the last ten minutes of his life, you
have to go right back to the beginning of his story. I felt a
pressure to do the same with us.
But where is the beginning of our story? This isn’t a
difficult question to answer. Every schoolchild learns
that our story began about 10,000 years ago with the
Agricultural Revolution. This isn’t the beginning of the
human story, but it’s certainly the beginning of our story.
It was from this beginning that all the wonders and
horrors of our civilization grew.
Everyone is vaguely aware that there have been two
ways of looking at the Agricultural Revolution within our
culture, two contradictory stories about its significance.
The standard version – the version taught in our schools –
goes something like this. Humans had been around for a
long time, three or four million years, living a miserable
and shiftless sort of life for most of that time, accomplishing nothing and getting nowhere. But then about 10,000
years ago it finally dawned on folks living in the Fertile
Crescent that they didn’t have to live like beavers and
bears, making do with whatever food happened to come
along; they could cultivate their own food and thus control their own destiny and well-being. Agriculture made it
possible for them to give up the nomadic life for the life of
farming villagers. Village life encouraged occupational
specialization and the advancement of technology on all
fronts. Before long, villages became towns, towns became
cities, and cities were gathered into kingdoms and
empires. Trade connections, elaborate social and economic
systems, and literacy soon followed, and there we went. All
these advances were based on – and impossible without –
agriculture, manifestly humanity’s greatest blessing.
The other story, a much older one, is tucked away in a
different corner of our cultural heritage. It too is set in the
Fertile Crescent and tells a tale of the birth of agriculture,
but in this telling agriculture isn’t represented as a blessing but rather as a curse: a punishment for a crime whose
exact nature has always profoundly puzzled us. I’m
referring, of course, to the story told in the third chapter
of Genesis, the Fall of Adam.
Both these stories are known to virtually everyone who
grows up in our culture, from Boston to Beirut to Beijing,
including every historian, philosopher, theologian, and
anthropologist. But like most thinkers of the midnineteenth century, who were content with the mere fact
of evolution and felt no pressure to explain it, all these
historians, philosophers, theologians, and anthropologists
seem perfectly content to live with these two contradictory
stories. The conflict is manifest but, for them, demands no
explanation.
For me, it did. As evolution demanded of Darwin a
theory that would make sense of it, the story in Genesis
demanded of me a theory that would make sense of it.
There have traditionally been two approaches to
Adam’s crime and punishment. The text tells us Adam
was invited to partake of every tree in the garden of Eden
except one, mysteriously called the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. As we know, Adam succumbed to
the temptation to sample the fruit of this tree. In one
approach, the crime is viewed as simple disobedience.
From this point of view, the selection of the knowledge of
good and evil for interdiction seems entirely arbitrary. God
might just as well have chosen the knowledge of war and
peace or the knowledge of pride and prejudice. The point
was simply to forbid Adam something in order to test his
obedience. Under this approach, Adam’s punishment –
banishment from Eden to live by the sweat of his brow as
a farmer – was in effect just a spanking; it doesn’t “fit
the crime” in any particular way. This is presumably the
punishment he would have received no matter what test he
failed.
The second approach attempts to make some sort of
connection between Adam’s crime and his punishment.
Under this approach, Eden is conventionally viewed as a
metaphor for the state of innocence, which is lost when
Adam gains the knowledge of good and evil. This makes
sense, but only if the knowledge of good and evil is understood as a metaphor for knowledge that destroys innocence. So with roughly equivalent metaphors at either end,
the story is reduced to banality: Adam lost his innocence
by gaining knowledge that destroyed his innocence.
The story of the Fall is coupled with a second that is
equally famous and equally baffling, the story of Cain and
Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
Abel. As conventionally understood, these two brothers
were literal individuals, the elder, Cain, a tiller of the soil,
and the younger, Abel, a herder. The improbability that
two members of the same family would embrace lifestyles
that were completely antithetical should tip us off to the
fact that these were not individuals but emblematic
figures, just as Adam was (Adam merely being the Hebrew
word for Man).
If we understand these as emblematic figures, then the
story begins to make sense. The firstborn of agriculture
was indeed the tiller of the soil, as Cain was said to be the
firstborn of Adam. This is an undoubted historical fact.
The domestication of plants is a process that begins the
day you plant your first seed, but the domestication of
animals is a process that takes generations; wild animals
don’t become tame overnight, so the herder Abel was
indeed the second-born – by centuries, if not millennia
(another reason to be skeptical of the notion that Cain and
Abel were literally second-generation brothers). A further
reason for skepticism on this point is the fact that the
farmers and herders of the period occupied adjacent but
distinctly different regions of the Near East. Farming was
the occupation of the Caucasian inhabitants of the lush
Fertile Crescent. Herding was the occupation of the
Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula to the south.
Another piece of background that needs to be understood is that in very ancient times the farming lifestyle
was radically different from the herding lifestyle. Tillers
of the soil were by the very nature of their work settled
villagers; but herders (by the very nature of their work)
were nomads, just as many present-day herding peoples
are. The herding lifestyle was closer to the huntinggathering lifestyle than it was to the farming lifestyle.
As the farming peoples of the north expanded, it was
inevitable that they would confront their Semitic herding
neighbors to the south, perhaps in what is now Iraq – with
the predictable result. As they have done from the beginning to the present moment, the tillers of the soil needed
more land to put to the plow, and as they have done from
the beginning to the present moment, they took it. As the
Semites saw it (and it is of course their version of the story
that we have in Genesis), the tiller of the soil Cain was
watering his fields with the blood of Abel the herder.
That the version we have is the Semitic version explains
the central mystery of the story, which is why God rejected
Cain’s gift but accepted Abel’s. Naturally, this is the way
the Semites would see it. In essence, the story says, “God is
on our side. God loves us and the way we live but hates the
tillers of the soil and the way they live.”
With these provisional understandings in place, I was
ready to offer a theory about the first part of the story, the
story of Adam’s Fall. What the Semitic authors knew was
only the present fact that their brothers from the north
were encroaching on them in a murderous way. They
hadn’t been physically present in the Fertile Crescent to
85
witness the actual birth of agriculture; this was an event
that may have occurred hundreds of years earlier, perhaps
even thousands of years earlier. All that was clear to them
was that some strange development had saddled their
brothers to the north with a laborious lifestyle and had
turned them into murderers, and they could only suppose
that this development was a catastrophe of some kind.
What they observed about their brothers to the north
was this peculiarity: they seemed to have the strange idea
that they knew how to run the world as well as God. This is
what marks them as our cultural ancestors. As we go about
our business of running the world, we have no doubt that
we’re doing as good a job as God, if not better. Obviously
God put a lot of creatures in the world that are superfluous
and even baneful, and we’re quite at liberty to get rid of
them. We know where the rivers should run, where the
swamps should be drained, where the forests should be
razed, where the mountains should be leveled, where the
plains should be scoured, where the rain should fall. To us,
it’s perfectly obvious that we have this knowledge.
In fact, to the authors of the stories in Genesis, it looked
as if their brothers to the north had the bizarre idea that
they had eaten at God’s own tree of wisdom and had
gained the very knowledge that God uses to rule the world.
And what knowledge is this? It is a knowledge that only
God is competent to use, the knowledge that every single
action that he might take – no matter what it is, no matter
how large or small – is good for one but evil for another. If
a fox goes out to stalk a pheasant, it’s in the hands of God
whether she will catch the pheasant or the pheasant will
escape. If God gives the pheasant to the fox, then this is
good for the fox but evil for the pheasant. If God allows
the pheasant to escape, then this is good for the pheasant
but evil for the fox. There is no outcome that is good for
both. The same is true in every area of the world’s governance. If God allows an early thaw and the valley is flooded,
then this is good for some but evil for others. If God holds
back the thaw then this too will be good for some but evil
for others.
Decisions of this kind are clearly at the very root of
what it means to rule the world, and the wisdom to make
them cannot possibly belong to any mere creature, like
Man, for any creature making such decisions would
inevitably say, “Every choice I make will be good for me
but evil for all others.” And of course this is precisely how
the agriculturalist operates, saying,
If I scour this plain to plant food for myself, then this
will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the
plain, but it’ll be good for me. If I raze this forest to
plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the
creatures that inhabit the forest, but it’ll be good for
me. If I kill off all the predators who might attack my
herds or my flocks, then this will be evil for them but
good for me.
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Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
What the authors of the stories in Genesis perceived
was that their brothers to the north had taken into their
own hands the rule of the world; they had usurped the role
of God. Those who let God run the world and take the food
that he has planted for them have an easy life. But those
who are not content with the way God runs the world and
want to run it themselves must necessarily plant their own
food, must necessarily make their living by the sweat of
their brow. As this makes plain, agriculture was not the
crime itself but rather the result of the crime, the punishment that must inevitably follow such a crime. It was
wielding the knowledge of good and evil that had turned
their brothers in the north into farmers – and into murderers (for murder comes easy to those who think they
know how to run the world better than God).
But these were not the only consequences to be
expected from Adam’s act. The fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil is harmless to God but deadly
to Man. It seemed to the authors of these stories that
usurping God’s role in the world would be the very death
of Man.
And so it seemed to me when I finally worked all this
out in the late 1970s. This investigation of the stories in
Genesis was not, for me, an exercise in biblical exegesis.
I’d gone looking for a way to understand how in the world
we’d brought ourselves face to face with death in such a
relatively short period of time – ten thousand years, a mere
eye-blink in the lifespan of our species – and had found it
in an ancient story that we long ago adopted as our own
and that remained stubbornly mysterious to us as long as
we insisted on reading it as if it were our own. When
examined from a point of view not our own, however, it
ceased to be mysterious and delivered up a meaning that
not only would have made sense to a beleaguered herding
people seven or eight thousand years ago but that would
also make sense to the beleaguered people of the late
twentieth century.
As far as I was concerned, the authors of this story had
gotten it right. In spite of the terrible mess we’ve made of
it, we do think we can run the world, and if we continue to
think this, it is going to be the death of us.
In case it isn’t evident, I should add that my reading of
Genesis is, of course, only a theory. This is what creationists say of evolution, that it’s “only a theory, it hasn’t been
proved,” as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal.
This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory,
which is to make sense of the evidence. So far, Darwin’s
theory remains the best way we’ve found to make sense of
the evidence, and my own theory has to be evaluated in
the same way. Does it make sense of the evidence – the
stories themselves – and does it make more sense than any
other theory?
But solving this particular riddle only began to alleviate
the pressure I felt for answers that were not being
looked for at any level of our culture. The philosophical
and theological foundations of our culture were laid down
by people who confidently believed that Man had been
born an agriculturalist and civilization builder. These
things were as instinctive to him as predation is to lions
or hiving is to bees. This meant that, to find and date
Man’s birth, one had only to look for the beginnings of
agriculture and civilization, and these were obviously not
very far back in time.
When in 1650 Irish theologian James Ussher
announced the date of creation as 23 October 4004 B.C.E.,
no one laughed or scoffed, or if they did, it was because of
the absurd exactitude of the date, not because the date was
absurdly recent. In fact, 4004 B.C.E. is quite a serviceable
date for the beginning of what we would recognize as
civilization. This being the case, it’s hardly surprising
that, for people who took it for granted that Man began
building civilization almost as soon as he was created,
4004 B.C.E. would seem like a perfectly reasonable date for
his creation.
But all this was soon to change. By the middle of the
nineteenth century the accumulated evidence of many
new sciences had pushed nearly every date in sight back
by many orders of magnitude. The universe and the Earth
were not thousands of years old, they were billions of
years old. The human past extended back millions of years
beyond the appearance of agriculture and the birth of
civilization. Only those who clung to a very literal reading
of the biblical creation story rejected the evidence; they
saw it as a hoax perpetrated on us either by the devil (to
confound us) or by God (to test our faith). For those who
accept the evidence of science, however, the notion that
Man had been born an agriculturalist and civilization
builder had been rendered totally untenable. He had very
definitely not been born either one.
This meant that the philosophical and theological
foundations of our culture had been laid by people with a
profoundly erroneous understanding of our nature, our
origins, and our history. It was therefore urgently important to reexamine these foundations and if necessary to
rebuild them from the ground up. Except, of course, that
no one at all thought this was urgently important – or even
slightly important. So human history extended millions of
years back beyond the birth of agriculture. Who cares? No
one in the ranks of philosophers or theologians felt the
sort of pressure that had moved Darwin to go beyond mere
acceptance of the fact. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin managed
to look at the facts and conclude that the phenomenon of
Man was still the central event in cosmic history, so the
foundations were intact. But then he had a vested interest
in preserving those foundations. Even so, his superiors
told him in no uncertain terms to leave the matter alone.
In the last century we gained an understanding of the
human story that made nonsense of everything we’d been
telling ourselves for upwards of three thousand years,
but our settled understandings remained completely
Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
unshaken. So what that Man had not been born an agriculturalist and a civilization builder? He was certainly born to
become an agriculturalist and a civilization builder. It was
beyond question that this was our foreordained destiny,
and the way we live is the way humans were meant to live
from the beginning of time. And indeed we must go on
living this way – even if it kills us.
Facts that were indisputable to all but biblical literalists
had radically repositioned us not only in the physical universe but in the history of our own species. That we had
been repositioned was all but universally acknowledged,
but no one felt any pressure to develop a theory that would
make sense of the fact, the way Darwin had made sense of
the fact of evolution. I did.
In Ishmael I made the point that the conflict between
the emblematic figures Cain and Abel didn’t end six or
eight thousand years ago in the Near East. Cain the tiller of
the soil has carried his knife with him to every corner of
the world, watering his fields with the blood of tribal
peoples wherever he found them. He arrived here in 1492
and over the next three centuries watered his fields with
the blood of millions of Native Americans. Today, he’s
down there in Brazil, knife poised over the few remaining
aboriginals in the heart of that country.
I sent a copy of the book to a friend who, by chance, is a
historian. He came back to me with a challenge: How do
you know that humans were living tribally 10,000 years
ago? This is an entirely valid question, which I answered
this way: How do you know that wolves were living in
packs 10,000 years ago? That whales were living in pods
10,000 years ago? That geese were living in flocks 10,000
years ago? That baboons were living in troops 10,000 years
ago? That bison were living in herds 10,000 years ago?
That bees were living in hives 10,000 years ago? Well, of
course you don’t, and you can’t. Social organizations –
and that’s what we’re talking about here – leave no fossils.
In the total absence of contrary evidence, however, it’s
entirely legitimate to assume that wolves, whales, geese,
baboons, bison, and bees did not just recently begin
living in packs, pods, flocks, troops, herds, and hives. It’s
legitimate for much the same reason that it’s legitimate to
assume that the universe did not just recently begin
expanding. It’s perfectly conceivable – but not at all
credible – that the universe just began expanding in the
year 1776.
Everything we’re able to observe about the world and
the universe indicates that things that work don’t
capriciously change the way they work. It would be absurd
to suppose that wolves originally evolved in hives but
then capriciously began living in packs instead, that bees
originally evolved in troops but then capriciously began
living in hives instead. On the contrary, the only thing that
makes sense is to assume that the reason we see wolves
living in packs today is that they evolved in packs, that the
reason we see bees living in hives today is that they
87
evolved in hives. It’s self-evident that no species emerges
by failing. Every species emerges by succeeding, and
natural selection rewards success with stability and
longevity. This is why we must assume that hiving for bees
represents the success that allowed bees to emerge as a
species in the first place.
In the fifteenth century, for the first time, we began
systematically exploring the territory beyond the civilized
world, and everywhere we went we found people living in
tribes – in every region of every continent. We found the
occasional civilization as well, of course, but again, wherever we did not find civilization, we found people living in
tribes, and there was no doubt in our minds that this social
organization predated our own – was more “primitive”
than our own.
The tribe among aboriginal peoples is as universal as
the flock among geese, and I doubt if any anthropologist
questions that it was humanity’s original social organization. We didn’t evolve in troops or hordes or bands. Rather,
we evolved in a social organization that was peculiarly
human, that was uniquely successful for culture-bearers.
It’s as reasonable to assume that we evolved as tribal
beings as it is to assume that bees evolved as hiving
beings. The tribe was successful for humans, which is why
it was still universally in place throughout the world three
million years later. That it was successful doesn’t, by the
way, mean it was invulnerable. If we were to explode a
hydrogen bomb in the interior of Brazil, we would wipe
out hundreds of thousands of species totally, but it would
hardly be reasonable to conclude that these species were
unsuccessful because they couldn’t survive a nuclear
explosion.
Our first look into the human past presents us with a
resounding challenge to the notion that the way we live
was the way humans were somehow meant to live from
the beginning of time. We can live in this hierarchical
organization called civilization, just as lions can live in
captivity, but saying that this was our inescapable destiny
is not much more sensible than saying that the zoo was the
inescapable destiny of lions. The tribal organization was
natural selection’s gift to humanity in the same way that
the flock was natural selection’s gift to geese.
The elemental glue that holds any tribe together is tribal law. Though this is easy to say, it’s less easy to understand, because the operation of tribal law is entirely
different from the operation of our law. Prohibition is the
essence of our law, but the essence of tribal law is remedy.
Misbehavior isn’t outlawed in any tribe. Rather, tribal
law prescribes what must happen in order to minimize
the effect of misbehavior and to produce a situation in
which everyone feels that they’ve been made as whole as
possible. Members of the tribe view their laws as inherently
friendly to them, invariably geared to make things better
for them, collectively and individually, never worse. For
us, of course, the law is an enemy. Collectively, perhaps,
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Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
it’s possible for us to view the law as society’s friend, but
for each of us individually, the law is an enemy always
poised to pounce on us. This doesn’t have to be pointed out
to anyone who happens to belong to a racial or ethnic
group that’s subject to police profiling. But it’s true for all
of us to a degree. A momentary loss of control or lapse in
judgment, a stupid action taken in panic, even an innocent
gesture taken the wrong way can put you behind bars.
In The Story of B I described in detail how adultery is
handled among the Alawa of Australia. If you have the
misfortune to fall in love with another man’s wife or
another woman’s husband, the law doesn’t say, “This is
prohibited and may not go forward.” It says, “If you want
your love to go forward, here’s what you must do to make
things right with all parties and to see to it that marriage
isn’t cheapened in the eyes of our children.” It’s quite an
elaborate process, but it works remarkably well. What
makes it even more remarkable is that the process was
not worked out in any legislature or by any committee.
It’s another gift of natural selection. Over countless
generations of testing, no better way of handling adultery
has been found or even conceivably could be found,
because – behold! – it works! It does just what the Alawa
want it to do, and no one tries to evade it. Even adulterers
don’t try to evade it – that’s how beautifully it works.
Some tribes live under laws that seem grotesque to us,
but they don’t ask us to live under them. Those laws
work for them – or they wouldn’t be in place. No tribe has
ever been found where the people hate their tribal laws.
Doubtless there have been tribes where people came to be
dissatisfied with their laws, but if so, those tribes have
disappeared. In a very real sense, dysfunctional tribes are
eliminated by natural selection in the same way dysfunctional species are.
One of the virtues of tribal law is that it presupposes
that people are just the way we know they are: generally
wise, kind, generous, and well intentioned but perfectly
capable of being foolish, unruly, moody, cantankerous,
selfish, greedy, violent, stupid, bad-tempered, sneaky,
lustful, treacherous, careless, vindictive, neglectful, petty,
and all sorts of other unpleasant things. Tribal law doesn’t
punish people for their shortcomings, as our law does.
Rather, it makes the management of their shortcomings an
easy and ordinary part of life, which is why the tribe has
worked so well for so long.
But during the developmental period of our hierarchical civilization, all this changed very dramatically.
Tribal peoples began to come together in larger and larger
associations, and one of the casualties of this process was
tribal law. If you take the Alawa of Australia and put them
together with the Gebusi of New Guinea, the Bushmen
of the Kalahari, and the Yanomami of Brazil, they are
very literally not going to know how to live. None of
these tribes is going to embrace the laws of the others,
which may not only be unknown to them but also be
incomprehensible to them. How then are they going
to handle mischief that occurs among them? The Gebusi
way or the Yanomami way? The Alawa way or the
Bushman way? Multiply this by a hundred, and you’ll
have a fair approximation of where people stood in the
early millennia of our own cultural development in the
Near East.
When you gather up a hundred tribes and expect them
to work and live together, tribal law becomes inapplicable
and useless. But of course the people in this amalgam are
the same as they always were: capable of being foolish,
moody, cantankerous, selfish, greedy, violent, stupid,
bad-tempered, and all the rest. In the tribal situation, this
was no problem, because tribal law was designed for
people like this. But all the tribal ways of handling these
ordinary human tendencies had been expunged in our
burgeoning civilization. A new way of handling them had
to be invented – and I stress the word invented. There was
no received, tested way of handling the mischief people
were capable of. Our cultural ancestors had to make something up, and what they made up were lists of prohibited
behavior.
Very understandably, they began with the big ones.
They weren’t going to prohibit moodiness or selfishness.
They prohibited things like murder, assault, and theft. Of
course we don’t know what the lists were like until the
dawn of literacy, but you can be sure they were in place,
because it’s hardly plausible that we murdered, robbed,
and thieved with impunity for five or six thousand years
until Hammurabi finally noticed that these were rather
disruptive activities.
When the Israelites escaped from Egypt in the thirteenth
century B.C.E., they were literally a lawless horde, because
of course they’d left the Egyptian list of prohibitions
behind. They needed their own list of prohibitions, which
God in his thoughtful way provided – the famous ten. But
of course ten didn’t do it. Hundreds more followed.
No number has ever done it for us. Not ten, not a hundred, not a thousand, not ten thousand, not a hundred
thousand. I have no idea how long the list is by now, but I
suspect it runs into the millions, and every single year we
pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter
how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do
the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been
eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be “sending
a message” to miscreants, but for some strange reason the
message never arrives, year after year, generation after
generation, century after century. Naturally, we consider
this to be a very advanced system.
No tribal people has ever been found that claimed not
to know how to live. On the contrary, anthropologists find
them to be completely confident that they know how to
live. But with the disappearance of tribal law among us,
people began to be acutely aware of not knowing how to
Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
live. A new class of specialists came to be in demand, their
specialty being the annunciation of how people are
supposed to live. These specialists we call prophets.
Naturally it takes special qualifications to be a prophet.
You must by definition know something the rest of us
don’t know, something the rest of us are clearly unable to
know. This means you must have a source of information
that is beyond normal reach – or else what good would
it be? A transcendent vision will do, as in the case of
Siddhartha Gautama. A vision led Joseph Smith to the
hidden scriptures known as the Book of Mormon. A dream
will do, provided it comes from God. But best of all, of
course, is direct, personal, unmediated communication
with God. The most persuasive and most highly valued
prophets, the ones that are worth dying for and killing for,
have the word directly from God.
But isn’t it true (people sometimes ask) that tribal
peoples have claimed to have prophets as well? Yes,
absolutely, but only when their tribal culture has been
destroyed by contact with us; they no longer know how
to live and so need the services of a prophet. One of the
most famous of these was Wovoka, to whom the means of
salvation for his people were revealed in a series of dreams
or visions; his Ghost Dance religion would defeat the
white man and restore the land to the natives of America.
Although some tribal peoples attribute their laws to
culture heroes in the distant past, that’s all it is, an attribution, rather like the attribution of fire to Prometheus. They
don’t consult these heroes about how to live (the way we
consult our prophets) any more than the Greeks consulted
Prometheus about how to start a fire. They don’t have
to consult them, because they themselves know how to
live. The knowledge is in them, not in some remote and
inaccessible being.
The appearance of religions based on prophetic revelations is unique to our culture. We alone in the history of all
humanity needed such religions. We still need them (and
new ones are being created every day), because we still
profoundly feel that we don’t know how to live. Our
religions are the peculiar creation of a bereft people. Yet
we don’t doubt for a moment that they are the religions of
humanity itself.
This belief was not an unreasonable one when it first
took root among us. Having long since forgotten that
humanity was here long before we came along, we
assumed that we were humanity itself and that our history
was human history itself. We imagined that humanity
had been in existence for just a few thousand years – and
that God had been in communication with us from the
beginning. So why wouldn’t our religions be the religions
of humanity itself?
When it became known that humanity was millions
of years older than we are, no one thought it odd that God
had remained aloof from the thousands of generations
that had come before us. After all, these were mere
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savages, unworthy of his attention. The philosophers and
theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
weren’t troubled by the fact that God disdained to reveal
himself until we came along. The fact alone was enough
for them, and they felt no pressure to develop a theory to
make sense of it. For Christians, it had long been accepted
that Christianity was humanity’s religion (which is why all
of humanity had to be converted to it, of course). It was
an effortless step for thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and
Matthew Fox to promote Christ from humanity’s Christ to
the Cosmic Christ.
On examination of the historical record, however, it
seemed to me that there once was a religion that could
plausibly be called the religion of humanity. It was
humanity’s first religion and its only universal religion,
found wherever humans were found, and it was plausible
to suppose that it had been in place for tens of thousands
of years. Christian missionaries encountered it wherever
they went, and piously set about destroying it. By now it
has been all but stamped out either by missionary efforts
or more simply by exterminating its adherents. If I am the
first to nominate it the most reasonable candidate to stand
as the religion of humanity, I certainly take no pride in
this, since it’s been in plain sight to us for hundreds of
years.
Of course it isn’t accounted a “real” religion, since it
isn’t one of ours. It’s just a sort of half-baked “prereligion.” How could it be anything else, since it emerged
long before God decided humans were worth talking to? It
wasn’t revealed by any accredited prophet, has no dogma,
no evident theology or doctrine, no liturgy, and produces
no interesting heresies or schisms. Worst of all, as far as I
know, no one has ever killed for it or died for it – and what
sort of religion is that? Considering all this, it’s actually
remarkable that we even have a name for it.
The religion I’m talking about is, of course, animism.
The name is our invention, derived from the Latin word for
soul or spirit. It came to be applied to the religious notions
of primitive peoples in the 1860s and 1870s. An early
definition was supplied by Sir Edward Tyler in his book
Primitive Culture:
Animism is the doctrine which places the sources
of mental and even physical life in an energy
independent of, or at least distinct from, the body.
From the point of view of the history of religions,
the term is taken, in the wider sense, to denote the
belief in the existence of spiritual beings, some
attached to bodies of which they constitute the
real personality (souls), others without necessary
connection with a determinate body (spirits) (Tyler
in Anderson 1950: 9).
I frankly haven’t any idea what that means, and I doubt
if you could find anyone to explain it to you in the jungles
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Animism – Humanity’s Original Religious Worldview
of Brazil or New Guinea. When that definition was cobbled
together, missionary reports were pretty thick on the
ground, but objective anthropological field studies were as
yet nonexistent. After decades of trying to understand
what so-called primitive people were trying to tell us
about their lives and their vision of humanity’s place in
the world, I concluded that a very simple worldview was
at the foundation of everything they were saying: The
world is a sacred place, and humanity belongs in such a
world.
It’s simple but also deceptively simple. This can best be
seen if we contrast it with the worldview at the foundation
of what our own religions tell us. In the worldview of our
religions, the world is anything but a sacred place. For
Christians, it’s merely a place of testing and has no
intrinsic value; it’s revealingly said that Satan is the Prince
of the World. For Buddhists the world is a place where
suffering is inevitable. If I oversimplify, my object is not to
misrepresent but only to clarify the general difference
between the animist worldview and the worldviews of our
culture’s religions.
For Christians, the world is not where humans belong;
it’s not our true home, it’s just a sort of waiting room
where we pass the time before moving on to our true
home, which is heaven. For Buddhists, the world is
another kind of waiting room, which we visit again and
again in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we
finally attain liberation in the state of nirvana. For Christians, if the world were a sacred place, we wouldn’t belong
in it, because we’re all sinners; God didn’t send his onlybegotten son to make us worthy of living in a sacred world
but to make us worthy of living in heaven. For Buddhists,
if the world were a sacred place, then why would we hope
to escape it? If the world were a sacred place, then would
we not rather welcome the repeating cycle of death and
rebirth?
From the animist point of view, humans belong in a
sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else,
but merely as sacred as anything else – as sacred as bison
or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.
I sometimes encounter those who resent the idea that
our ancestors may have gotten in ahead of us, may have
possessed a more sublime vision of the world and humanity’s place in it than any of ours. They’ll ask, “Well, isn’t
this just paganism?” or “Isn’t this just pantheism?” Meaning, didn’t we come up with the same thing? I quarrel with
no one’s answer to this question, but my own answer is no.
Paganism, derived from the Latin word for countrydweller, is a farmer’s religion and developed from farmers’
concerns for the fertility of their land and animals, spawning one god after another to look after one thing after
another when appropriately compensated through one
kind of a sacrifice or another. If animism were kin to
paganism, I’d expect to see it producing similar results, but
I’ve never done so. Varying widely in its details from
people to people, animism doesn’t automatically posit the
existence of one God or many gods or any gods at all.
Pantheism declares not only that a specifically singular
God exists but that everything is God. If anthropological
studies of them are to be trusted, tribal animists have no
taste for such dogmatic speculations about the nature of
God, so I see no grounds for equating animism with
pantheism.
The religions of our culture – the so-called Major Religions – are very much ours (and not humanity’s), because
they answer our particular needs, providing us with ways
to rationalize the immutable condition of inequity we
experience. Why do a few of us enjoy lives of wealth,
power, ease, and luxury while the masses endure lives of
poverty, helplessness, toil, and squalor?
Different rationales for this condition developed in the
East and West. In the East, under the theory of karma,
one’s sins and virtues are punished or rewarded in this and
subsequent lives; thus if you’re born to the life of an
untouchable in Bhaktapur, India, where you can never
hope to rise to any occupation above cleaning latrines,
you have no one to blame but yourself. You have no
grounds to envy or hate the Brahmans who shun and despise you; their life of felicity and leisure is only what they
deserve, just as your life of poverty and misery is only
what you deserve. In this way the arrangement of people
into high, middle, and low classes is shown to be justice
made manifest in a divinely ordered universe. Buddhism
may be seen as offering relief from this rigid posture of
resignation to one’s lot. Buddha assured his followers that
the poor and downtrodden are (or ultimately will be) better
off than the rich and powerful, who will find it almost
impossible to attain salvation. The poor can live most
happily, Buddha said, possessing nothing and living on
joy alone, like the radiant gods.
In the West a different rationale was offered by the
religions of the Abrahamic tradition – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The meek (that is, the suffering poor) will
inherit the Earth, Jesus said, and the kingdom of God
will turn the hierarchy upside down; the kingdom of
God will belong to the poor, not to the rich, and rulers
and ruled will change places, making the first last and the
last first. Jesus and Buddha agree that, contrary to appearances, riches don’t make people happy. Rather, says
Buddha, riches just make them greedy. And the poor
shouldn’t envy the rich their treasures, which are always
subject to being stolen by thieves or eaten up by moths
and rust; rather, Jesus says, they should accumulate
incorruptible treasures in heaven.
Humanity lived for three or four million years without
needing rationales like these, since in the tribal organization – notably nonhierarchical – when times are bad all
suffer alike, and when times are good all flourish alike.
For two hundred thousand generations of our species,
Anishnabeg Culture
religions like ours not only didn’t exist, they would also
have been superfluous and incomprehensible.
Daniel Quinn
Further Reading
Anderson, J.N.D., ed. The World’s Religions. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1950.
Deloria, Jr., Vine. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion.
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.
Farb, Peter. Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the
Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the
Coming of the Industrial State. New York: E.P. Dutton
& Co., Inc., 1968.
Mowat, Farley. People of the Deer. New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 1951, 1952.
Quinn, Daniel. The Story of B. New York: Bantam Books,
1996.
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. New York: Bantam Books,
1992.
Waipuldanya, with Douglas Lockwood. I, the Aboriginal.
Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962.
See also: Anarchism; Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible;
Animism; Animism – A Contemporary Perspective; Bioregionalism and the North American Bioregional Congress;
Ecology and Religion; Evolutionary Biology, Religion, and
Stewardship; Fall, The; Fox, Matthew; Ghost Dance;
Magic, Animism, and the Shaman’s Craft; Paganism –
A Jewish Perspective; Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre.
Anishnabeg Culture
The Algonkian-speaking Anishnabeg (meaning “human
beings”) of the Great Lakes region of North America
includes speakers of the Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe
(Chippewa) and Potawatomi dialects, now known among
themselves as the Three Fires, as well as the Algonquins, to
their east. Sharing major features of their religion,
language and culture are the Cree who live to their north
and west, and the various native peoples who live north
and south of the St. Lawrence River, as well as Labrador
and Newfoundland; more distantly related are the
Pikuni (Blackfoot, Blood), who live east of the northern
Rockies.
The Anishnabe reserves (Canada) and reservations
(United States) are now located in Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Michigan, Manitoba and Ontario. Their migration myth
speaks of moving from the Atlantic coast along the St.
Lawrence River to the Great Lakes. In pre-contact times,
the Anishnabeg lived not only in the above areas but
along the Atlantic seaboard and the Midwest (Ohio,
Illinois, Kentucky) of the present-day United States. In the
latter areas, they practiced horticulture and lived in
settlements.
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Before the effects of contact with Europeans, the Great
Lakes Anishnabeg lived a semi-nomadic huntinggathering lifestyle, traveling by canoe and snowshoe over
an established yearly round; for example, traveling to
maple forests in early spring when the sap runs and particular lakes in early fall when the “wild rice” ripens. Many
traded with more settled peoples, such as the Iroquoianspeaking Wyandot (Hurons), exchanging dried meat and
hides for corn and tobacco. Some carried out small-scale
horticulture on their own, where the soil and climate was
suitable. Some mined copper in shallow pits. Hence, they
were familiar not only with towns, but with urban,
mercantile centers, such as Cahokia, across the Mississippi
from present-day St. Louis, long before Europeans arrived
on the scene.
For these people, as hunting-gathering cultures everywhere, “religion,” “spirituality” and “nature” are meaningless terms, for each term would include every aspect of
their lives; hence, these words do not denote anything
distinguishable, in and of themselves. It is impossible
for modern humans to fully appreciate what it meant
to live in a situation where everything perceivable is
undomesticated nature and every facet of nature is individually numinous. Hence, virtually everything observed
or done involved a spiritual, ritual interaction with a
manido (spirit/deity); all one’s neighbors shared the
same understanding; and one’s language reflected these
understandings in nuanced, complex ways. Let us, however, attempt to generalize from the contemporary
hermeneutic as to how we humans understood the
environment as hunter-gatherers.
The world around one – sun, moon, stars, Earth, rivers
and lakes, animals, fish, trees, plants, stones (those that are
animate), etc. – consists of numinous relatives; we live
amidst the divine. These relatives are all more powerful
than humans, for humans depend on them for life, but
they do not need humans to survive. We need these relations to sacrifice themselves for the many things we
require: branches and bark for shelter (wigwams), canoes,
baskets and firewood; skin, flesh, bones and sinews for
clothing, food, tools and thread; berries, seeds (wild
grains), sap and tubers for food, medicine, glue and waterproofing. We encourage our relatives to give themselves
to us for these needs by crying to them, asking them to
pity us and give us their lives so we may live; in turn,
we reciprocate by giving them symbolic gifts, especially
tobacco, by honoring them through rituals, by always
speaking to them respectfully, and by never wasting their
precious gifts. For if we do not, they may not listen to us
again or may not come back to life so that they can again
sacrifice themselves for our needs.
Humans are so weak and pitiable that not only do we
need the gifts of spirits to live, we also need a special,
personal relationship with one or more manido in order to
carry out our functions and for protection from assorted